


1001 Days

by Masu_Trout



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Caliginous Romance, Excessive Swearing, F/M, Homestuck Shipping Olympics, Pale Romance, Storytelling, Time Travel, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-21
Updated: 2011-09-21
Packaged: 2017-10-23 22:35:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,863
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/255806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Masu_Trout/pseuds/Masu_Trout
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's a mutated freak intruding in The Grand Highblood's domain, a pale little slip of a girl who spreads heresies like she's talking about the weather. Somehow, he finds he's okay with that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1001 Days

It’s nearly dawn by the time they bring the fodder in.

Officially they’re “low-risk convicts,” but The Grand Highblood cares about the rules about as much as he cares about the woman who makes them—that is to say, fuck them both ‘till he can paint his precious wall with their blood.

(‘Bout all the motherfucking bitch could ever be good for anyway.)

As always, they’re lead into his room by a pair of subordinates, whichever two were unlucky or stupid enough to be around him when he’s at his most irritable. The fodder, prisoners without a crime serious enough or blood rich enough to be given a proper trial, are lead into a room made for this purpose by the previous High Subbjugglator.

He watches as his subordinates chain the prisoners to the walls, snapping out orders and occasionally threatening to snap their necks so they’ll move a bit faster. It takes them far, far too long (Any time is too long, after all, there’s blood to be spilled and carnage to be had and why won’t those motherfuckers just hurry up) but they finally manage to restrain every last sorry looking bag of flesh and blood.

A snap of his teeth is all it takes to send his worthless minions scurrying off down the hall. For a moment he considers calling one back and ripping his throat open, but he decides against it. If he spilled blood here, so far from his precious wall, it would be wasted. Anyway, he thinks, surveying the multitude of terrified faces turned towards him, he has a better distraction.

“Alright,” he snaps. The prisoners jump at the sound of his voice, one actually keening in fear. He grins, white fangs gleaming in the moonlight, and says, “Listen up, motherfuckers, ‘cause I’m going to explain what’s motherfucking up. You see that grate up there?”

Eyes closed, he tilts his head back to where the moonlight’s streaming in. Maybe they look, maybe they don’t; he doesn’t care. They’ll scream for him just the same.

“So…” he murmurs, drawing out the moment. He craves this, being in the spotlight, knowing that they all hate him more deeply and passionately than they ever hated any of their kismesii, and that the only things keeping them from pouncing on him and tearing him apart are the chains on their wrists and the fear in their hearts.

God, he needs that terror. He lives for it.

He snaps open his purple rimmed eyes and glares around the room, trying to catch the eyes of as many prisoners as he can. Orangeblood here, greenblood there—the color variation in this group is exciting. His wall will be so bright this time tomorrow. There’s over a hundred packed in this tiny square, shoved together like pack lusii, so it’s impossible to see them all, let alone determine the exact shade of each of his guests. But that’s okay. Right now, everything’s okay.

“In a few minutes,” he says, “It’s going to be daytime out, and the motherfucking sun’ll start pouring through that motherfucking hole.”

He feels rather than hears the gasps that echo around the room as his audience realizes what he is saying. They’ll be cooked alive.

“You’d better keep an eye on that sun.” He’s had it once or twice where a troll took his advice literally and ended up going blind. Fun times. “Because when it crosses all the way across the sky and the moon comes back up? That’s when I’m gonna drag the survivors out of here, over to my wall, and makes some art.”

He winks as he turns to leave the room, nerves thrumming with an intoxicating tension. They only bring large groups in once a month—he’d almost forgotten how this felt.

“Bye-bye!” he chirps, and slams the door.

\--

The Grand Highblood doesn’t go far. Well, that’s kind of an understatement. He takes two steps, turns around, and sits down against the wall of his room. The screams are the best part, sweet music to his ears, and he wouldn’t miss it for the world. It’s the only thing that keeps him from murdering all his underlings during the tiresome court cases and hearings that make up most of his month.

This time, though, something’s different. As the sun starts to crest over the hill and the first wave of pain starts up, a voice cuts through the room, interrupting the whimpers and moans.

“Would everybody calm down, please?”

The first thing he notices is that the voice is female. Young, he adds after a moment, and speaking in Commontongue rather than Troll. Probably a dark green or light teal, an uppity middling-blood who fancies herself a scholar.

“I understand you’re all in pain,” she continues, and he wants to revise his earlier thought of “young,” because now she sounds ancient and impossibly tired. “But I believe The Grand Whatever-He’s-Called can hear us, and he’s certainly deriving pleasure from it.”

And. Well.

By all rights he should hate this troll, should want to rip open her spine and pull out her organs, should hate her in the same way he hates The Empress. She’s insulted his title, stopped his symphony, and challenged him through some passive-aggressive jab.

But between what she’s saying and her tone of voice, he can tell that’s not her real reason for speaking. She’s asking for quiet because she’s young but she’s old and she’s tired of screaming, tired of watching trolls suffer and gasp out their dying breaths.

And if he forces his black little heart to beat out a feeling it’s never tried to process before, this little girl might be something approaching pitiful.

“Shut up,” rasps a prisoner. “What kind of disgusting mutant are you, anyway? You look hideous.”

It’s with relief that The Grand Highblood realizes that this girl hasn’t robbed him of his ability to hate entirely. He wants to rip open the door, walk over, and simply tear him apart.

Who does he think he is, interrupting her?

“I,” the girl says calmly, “Am a time-travelling alien from the future.”

“You’re crazy,” snarls another voice, and though The Grand Highblood rarely finds himself in a position to be agreeing with any of his prisoners, he thinks that one might be right.

“Perhaps that’s true,” she says, resolve unbroken.

“Maybe?” someone snorts, and trolls all around the room laugh.

“Yes, maybe. Perhaps…”

She trails off for a moment, and he tries desperately to imagine what she must be doing. Shrugging, maybe, or smirking. Or would she be more the sort of troll to tap her horns when she’s thinking? Before, listening in had always been enough, but now he finds it woefully inadequate. He wants to watch every little quirk of hers, captchalogue her personality and take it out to play with when he gets bored. She is new and she is different and she is fascinating.

“Perhaps,” she finally continues, “I can tell you my story. Then you could decide for yourselves whether to believe me.”

As far as he can tell none of the prisoners say anything, but she starts anyway. The sun must be rising by now, but her voice never wavers even as others start to moan in pain.

And by Glb’golyb is it ever a story. She tells of a planet far away, inhabited by aliens different from anything seen on Alternia, of machines that create items from nothing and of small black monsters, of being contacted by trolls (Aliens, she calls them, as though their species is the strange one).

Her tale is long and rambling and her prose is purpler than his blood, and at first he thinks she really is crazy.

That actually makes his pity for her lessen. There’s a difference between lesser beings and mere insects, and if he were ever to take a moirail he would not dare have one from the latter group. But he listens, entranced in spite of himself, and slowly the pieces slide into place.

The first thing he notices is that her description of an uptight but powerful blueblooded mechanic sounds suspiciously like Expatriate Darkleer. He shrugs it off, assuming she got his description from some old history book. (He’s in enough of them, his picture above captions like “traitor” and “failure and “God, what a motherfucking loser, can you believe he hasn’t been culled yet?”)

But once he makes that connection he starts to see other oddities. Like how Aradia, the maroonblood she talks about, is similar in personality to an annoying rebel he culled a hundred sweeps ago. Or the fact that the kitty-cat greenblood could easily be a younger version of Darkleer’s long-dead moirail. He can’t quite place the orangeblood, but the tealblood called Terezi sounds just like the recently deceased Redglare and the sp8der must be Mindfang.

Hours pass, and slowly, with a growing sense of excitement, he figures out who the characters in her story are. “Eridan” is Dualscar, (And he gets a perverse sort of pleasure listening to the escapades of a man he culled only a season ago) “Sollux” and “Kanaya” were both part of a…certain rebellion he put down many sweeps ago, and there’s no way “Feferi” could be anything but a caricature of The Empress, twisted into a cuttlefish-culling, lowblood-loving caricature of herself. (And if weren’t already plae for her she would have earned his loyalty just through that little bit of satire.)

The only one he wonders about is the angry one, the leader who swears and snarls in anonymous gray text. It’s easy enough to pass him off as a nobody like the rustveined boy, but something tells him that’s wrong. Karkat seems familiar, and it’s only the fact that she wouldn’t dare, nobody would dare, that keeps him from thinking he knows who this is supposed to be.

By now the screams have started up in full. Normally he’d be entranced, but tonight he just wants those motherfucking pansies to shut up so he can hear what she has to say, to know if he might be right about the identity of this Karkat Vantas. Eyes closed, he sits and listens.

\--

It isn’t until much later that he hears footsteps coming down the halls. He snaps one eye open, hands on his clubs, and hauls himself to his feet. There shouldn’t be anyone down here at this time of day.

As the footsteps grow closer, he launches himself into the middle of the hallway, clubs out. There’s two there, but he smashes open the head of the first before it has time to do anything but snarl.

The other shrieks, and he realizes that her voice sounds familiar just quickly enough to avoid taking his other subordinate’s head off.

“Highblood, sir!” she stammers once she realizes he isn’t about to kill her. “What’re you doing?”

“Killing trolls,” he snaps, slinging his clubs back into his strife deck. “You?”

“Well, sir,” she says, avoiding eye contact, “We were here to escort the prisoners. It’s past sunset, so I thought maybe you’d be in with them already?”

He looks over, and sure enough there’s no longer any light streaming from around the doorframe.

“Huh, so it is. Well-” He grins. “-You’d better work extra hard tonight then, huh? Seeing as you’re already down a partner and all.”

The woman gulps and nods.

As he pulls the keys out of his sylladex and fits them into the door, he realizes he’s the least angry he’s been in sweeps. (She hasn’t even become his official moirail yet—though, given his unique talent for persuasion, it’s only a matter of time—and already she is a calming influence.) He want to meet this little revolutionary, talk politics with her on his corpse pile, take her apart and see what makes her tick.

“Hellllo, motherfuckers!” he says as he opens the door. By now most of them are little more than charred husks, far beyond fear, but he still manages to get a few terrified moans. “Now, I’ve got a motherfucking question for you. Which one of you was telling that little story?”

“That would be me,” a familiar voice calls. The Grand Highblood turns.

His first thought is that she is hideous. Hornless and tiny, with skin so pale it’s a wonder she wasn’t culled already. It’s obvious something went horribly wrong when the mother grub was combining her batch of slurry. The Grand Highblood is suddenly very glad he didn’t lean flushed for her instead, because even if her mutated physique were somehow able to produce enough material to fill a bucket, he’d never be able to get that intimate with her.

His second thought is that she is perfect. She’s disgusting and ugly and slated for death, but she’s still looking up at him with that calm, cool expression on her face, like he’s no threat to her at all. Somehow, through her mutated skin or some clever trick, she managed to avoid being burned by the sun, and so her glare is clear and fierce. It’s quite possibly the most pitiful thing he’s seen in his life.

“It was pretty good,” he says, leaning down. “What’s your name, wriggler?”

The girl inclines her head, but doesn’t otherwise seem to acknowledge the insult. “Rose, if you must know. I’m glad to hear you liked it, though it’s quite unfortunate nighttime came when it did. I was far from finished, and now it seems I will have to die.” At that she smirks up at him.

There’s no way he’s ever letting this odd little specimen die, and perhaps she knows that too. He leers, showing off a mouthful of knives, and says, “That is a motherfucking shame, isn’t it? I was hoping to hear the rest.”

“Well,” she says, toying with the hem of her dress and running her hands around the edges of her odd sigil. “Perhaps if we could postpone the date of my execution, I could make some time to tell you? No guarantees, of course. I am a very busy woman.”

“Hmm.” He tilts his head, pretending to think it over. At last he shrugs.

“Well, I could live with that. Just until your motherfucking time-travelling alien friends come to pick you up, yeah?”

“Of course,” she says with a small secret smile.

“Sir?” interjects his confused subordinate. “The prisoners-”

“Fuck the prisoners,” he snarls. “I’ll take care of them in a minute.”

He turns his attention back to Rose, softening his expression. “I’ve just got one more question for you, little lady.” He wants to run his hand along her cheek and up into her hair, feel the softness of her pale skin and scrape his claws along the bare scalp where her horns should be. It’s only the fact that there’s a room full of eyes watching him that keeps him still. Instead, he leans in, so close his breath ghosts along her rounded ear, and whispers, “The boy in your story, the grey-text one. Why does he keep his blood color a secret?”

Rose leans back into his touch and carefully fits her mouth to his own ear.

“Well,” she whispers back, “This was supposed to be a shocking plot twist, but I suppose I can tell you early if you insist.” She pauses, letting the tension he feels build, making him wonder if she’s talking about what he suspect she is. What he hopes she is.

“Karat,” she murmurs, “Is a mutant with bright candy red blood.”

Oh.

Yes.

He was right. He was right all along, and this girl is a genius. He stand up and laughs, great shaking howls that leave him nearly doubled over in the center of the room, a hundred frightened (and one amused) pairs of eyes staring at him.

Judging from her eloquence, she’s probably told this story before ten, twenty times, and nobody ever caught on. (They couldn’t have, or she’d be long, long dead already.) Hundreds and hundreds of sweeps ago, the Empress forbade any reference to the Sufferer by pain of death, and yet this girl is sitting here, subverting the Alternian government through a fairy tale. It’s a giant middle claw right in the Empress’s face, and nobody ever caught on to it.

Rose may have misshapen teeth, missing horns and lusus-white skin, but she is brilliant and he’s the only one who knows it.

“Hey,” he barks, snapping his fingers at his subordinate.

The woman jumps to attention, fear reflected in her wide yellow eyes.

“Forget helping me with the prisoners tonight. I’ll take care of it myself. Instead, I want you to take this little motherfucker-” he points down at Rose, “-Up to my respiteblock. Make sure she doesn’t escape. Got it?”

“Huh?”

 _“Got it?” ___

“Um, yes! Of course, sir!”

He unchains his prisoners, slapping them around a little and messing with their heads. But tonight his mind isn’t on the colors his wall will turn or they way his fodder will scream. Instead, it’s on a little mutant with a bone-white sigil sitting up in his respiteblock.

The Grand Highblood is eager to hear the rest of her story.

**Author's Note:**

> I've finally gotten over my embarrassment about writing such a ridiculous pairing and decided to post this on AO3. I'm on Team Alchemiter for HSO, and the cliche I worked with was "love at first sight." This didn't end up being the submission my team sent in, but I really enjoyed writing it nonetheless!


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